Jeremy Butterfield's Blog, page 8
May 4, 2021
Up to the knees in sleaze. History and meaning of the word sleaze.
Sleaze has been around a long time. I mean the word, not political corruption or sexual shenanigans, which are as old as time. Recently it’s been prominent in the news thanks to Boris Johnson and the wallpapergate scandal, caused by his bidie-in’s voracious redecorating appetite.1
A four-minute read.
The Atlantic supposedly divides sleaze neatly into two distinct senses – though the reality is more nuanced. In Britain it tends to mean ‘corruption’, with sex optionally involved. Oxford online defines sleaze accordingly as ‘immoral, sordid, and corrupt behaviour or activities’, which covers all the bases. In the U.S. it’s more often a personal reproach: an American sleaze is ‘a sordid, corrupt, or immoral person’, though that meaning is known this side of the pond as well.
Sleaze is much more common in British than American English. What that says about our respective real worlds I don’t pretend to know.
Sleaze goes hand in hand with corruption. I mean linguistically, not factually: corruption is sleaze’s most frequent noun bedfellow, followed a long way off by sex and then scandal. Sleaze, I maintain, possesses excellent mouthfeel – as the wine buffs and foodies would style it. Which is why it rears its ugly head with greater than average frequency – statistically speaking – in journalese. If it had a colour, it would be orange. If it had a voice, it would sound loud and brassy. Mouthfeelwise again, there’s something louche about that sl-, which links sleaze with slime, sludge, slurry, slush, not to mention slut and slattern. (Anatoly Liberman discusses the negative connotations of sl– words here.)
When did the word sleaze appear?The earliest OED citation is from that organ of civility The Listener (Alas, who now remembers it?).
For all its brazen sleaze, Soho is a pretty fair working model of what a city neighbourhood should be.
1967 Listener 14 Sept. 326/2
That date chimes with my recollection of when certain school chums and I were fascinated by its novelty in the newspapers, though in connection with what long-ago scandal I can’t recall. ‘Up to the knees in sleaze’, is a phrase that rings down the dusty corridors of memory, though whether it was a tabloid masthead or a jingle we invented I have no idea.
It took until 1986 for it to appear in Hansard in connection with – guess what – financial sleaze related to the Conservative government’s privatisation programme. As it happens, the most common prenominal word for sleaze is Tory, though the Labour Party is not unsullied.
Its other meaning, of ‘a person of low moral standards’ as the OED rather starchily defines it, is first recorded by Jonathon Green in his magisterial Green’s Dictionary of Slang from 1971 from a slang journal as ‘a sexually promiscuous woman’.
The OED concurs with his next meaning of ‘unappealing seedy person’ from 1976:
When I made the mistake of calling them ‘sleazy’ to their faces, their reaction was outrage. ‘Don’t call me a sleaze,’ said Miss Currie.
1976 Telegraph (Brisbane) 3 Aug. 10/3
Next, in 1980 from the U.S. comes the meaning of ‘Political corruption or impropriety; corrupt or scandalous behaviour by public officials’, which, it seems to me, is very much the meaning it has long had in the UK.
Public perceptions may lump all 535 House and Senate members together in a great ball of sleaze, but in the real world of Capitol Hill it is not that way.
1980 Washington Post 4 Feb. a6/1
Although this use started in the U.S., it now seems particularly British. So much so, in fact, that an American was sufficiently puzzled by this meaning to query it with the doyenne of British/American differences, Professor Lynne Murphy.
Where does the word sleaze come from?It’s a back-formation from the adjective sleazy, which is not recent (1644) but originally described cloth that was ‘thin or flimsy in texture’ as the OED puts it. Sleazy figures in one of the earlier English dictionaries, Thomas Blount’s Glossographia of 1670:
Sleasie Holland, common people take to be all Holland, which is slight or ill-wrought.
(Holland here means a form of linen cloth.)
As to where sleazy comes from, the OED editors shrug their shoulders and tag it ‘of uncertain origin’.
It quickly developed an extended or figurative meaning, as in:
Their vain, and sleasy opinions, about Religion.
1648 N. Ward To Parliament at Westminster 26
in a sense which the OED has not marked as ‘obsolete’ but presumably will when the team get round to revising it.
The OED dates the first written citation for sleazy meaning ‘squalid, sordid, disreputable’ to 1941, but Jonathon Green, antedates it to a 1930s U.S. quotation to which he assigns the meaning ‘of a person, unpleasant…distasteful’:
Al and his sleezy wife.
1937 ‘F. Bonnamy’ Death on a Dude Ranch (1953) 80
Two years earlier than that came the U.S. meaning ‘of a thing, dirty, run-down, decayed’ but it is not until 1972 according to Green that it appears in its sexualised meaning of ‘perverse’, again in the U.S. and in the form sleazo.
Death-trip [satanist] groups that must have provided powerful sleazo inputs into Manson.
E. Sanders Family 73
The earliest citation in the OED that links sleazy to sex is from Punch:
A kind of sleazy, leering sex for its own sake.
1958 Punch 27 Aug. 286/2
What about its derivatives or word family?
Being a somewhat promiscuous word, it has engendered quite a brood:
sleazebag (1981)
sleazeball (1983)
sleazebucket (1983)
sleazehole (1986)
sleazemonger (1996)
sleazoid adj (1976)
sleazster (2000)
And then there is the verb to sleaze, which goes back to 1777, but is first cited in the OED as meaning ‘to move in a sleazy fashion’ in Punch:
Other plays, sleazing across the West End boards.
1964 Punch 30 Dec. 986/2
I was reminded of sleaze and its story when I encountered sleazebag in the hallucinatorily brilliant Bad News by Edward St Aubyn. The protagonist, Patrick Melrose, a major-league drug user, is aflame with desire for his girlfriend’s friend Marianne, with whom he is having dinner. Her thoughts:
‘There he was drooling at her again. The green velvet dress was obviously a big hit. It made her angry to think of Debbie, who was crazy and ragged with love of this sleazeball (Marianne had made the mistake of calling him “a temporary aberration” at the beginning, but Debbie had forgiven her now that she wished it was true), of Debbie being rewarded with this would-be infidelity, no doubt as generalized as his insatiable appetite for drugs.’
1 The wallpaper used to redecorate the 11 Downing Street flat was claimed in the press to have cost £840 ($1160) a roll.
References:
“sleazy, adj.”. OED Online. March 2021. Oxford University Press. https://oed.com/view/Entry/181563 (accessed May 01, 2021).
“sleaze, n.”. OED Online. March 2021. Oxford University Press. https://oed.com/view/Entry/181557 (accessed May 01, 2021).
“sleaze, v.”. OED Online. March 2021. Oxford University Press. https://oed.com/view/Entry/181558 (accessed May 01, 2021).
“sleazy, adj.”.Green’s Dictionary of Slang. Digital Edition. 2021. https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/6wugg5q (accessed May 01, 2021).
“sleaze, n.”.Green’s Dictionary of Slang. Digital Edition. 2021. https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/mdiqr3q (accessed May 02, 2021).
Murphy, LM (2021) Sleaze. In: Separated by a Common Language. Available at: https://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com (accessed May 02, 2021).
St Aubyn, E (2012) Bad News [1992]. London: Pam Macmillan, p.193.
April 23, 2021
Restore Our Earth – Collins Dictionary Language Blog
My post for yesterday’s Earth Day and all the interesting words we use to talk about Mother Earth.
April 22 is Earth Day, so Collins Dictionary looks at associated words of planet Earth and the environment since its inception 51 years ago.
Source: Restore Our Earth – Collins Dictionary Language Blog
April 22, 2021
You say catafalque, I say catafalco – or grave or tomb
Oh what a mongrel language is ours!
TV coverage of The Duke of Edinburgh’s magnificent funeral focused attention on a word we rarely get to hear or read: catafalque.
That set me thinking about where other language of funerals comes from. It’s perhaps surprising how many of the words listed and discussed below are loanwords. Of catafalque, bier, hearse, coffin, funeral, grieve, mourn, bury, widow(er), grave and tomb, only bier, mourn, bury, widow(er) and grave are Germanic, i.e. inherited from Old English.
Interestingly, both coffin and hearse are included in the first and second English ‘hard words’ dictionaries, which suggests they were novel and strange to most people at that time (the early seventeenth century),
catafalque: Webster’s defines it as ‘a wooden framework, usually draped, on which the body in a coffin lies in state during an elaborate funeral’.
The important point is ‘during an elaborate funeral’. You (no disrespect intended!) and I are unlikely to lie on one in death.
Catafalque is a word English purloined from French catafalque in the mid-seventeenth century. Following a not uncommon itinerary for ‘English’ words, French catafalque had in turn been borrowed from Italian catafalco, the origins of which are obscure though some link the cata– part to Greek kata.
The word’s variants in French produced modern French échafaud, which is the origin of English scaffold. Catafalques might be more than mere platforms to rest the coffin on, but rather funerary monuments. After all, Prince Philip’s catafalque was raised a few feet above floor level and draped in purple.
John Evelyn’s three references to it in his diaries all mention it in relation to royalty or the nobility, which suggests an imposing construction of some kind, not a simple surface. He uses the French spelling twice and the Italian catafalco when in Rome, where he calls the catafalco for the Queen of Spain ‘most stately’. He must have known his catafalques when he saw one, for he saw three – in Brussels, Beauvais and Rome.
bier – Added because that is what you and I would call the movable platform on which a coffin might rest, wouldn’t we? The Collins Dictionary defines it as ‘a platform or stand on which a corpse or a coffin containing a corpse rests before burial’.
That last bit is crucial. A corpse, not a coffin, might be carried on a bier, for instance in a Hindu funeral when the body is taken to be cremated.
This word is from the Germanic bedrock of English vocabulary, or, in the standard wording of the OED for such cases, after the rubric ‘origin’, ‘a word inherited from Germanic’. In Old English it was bǽr, and the –ie– spelling seems to have been influenced by French. It is related to the verb to bear, which makes sense.
hearse – the Duke’s was a specially adapted Land Rover. Humbler folk will make do with whatever the undertaker provides – as long as it’s black, presumably. Unlike bier, though, hearse has an almost exotic origin and a torturous development to reach its current meaning of the vehicle which transports the coffin.
First, where it comes from. According to the OED, it was originally spelled herse, from Anglo-Norman French herce ‘harrow, frame’, from Latin hirpex, hirpicis, ‘a kind of large rake’, from Oscan hirpus ‘wolf’ (with reference to the teeth).
Oscan? An extinct Italic language related to Latin. Apparently, some of the street signs in Pompeii are in Oscan.
This image from the Luttrell Psalter shows what a medieval harrow might have looked like and hence how the design might have carried over into the hearse as defined below.
British Library, Luttrell Psalter, c.1325–1340 Shelfmark Add MS 42130 – The text seems to be Psalm 94.
As regards how its meaning developed according to the OED, read on. The bracketed dates refer to the earliest written citations in the OED.
a) First it was ‘an elaborate framework designed to carry a large number of tapers and other decorations placed over the coffin of a notable person as it lay in the church’.
Known in Latin in this sense since the thirteenth century [1291], it is recorded by Marvell in the seventeenth:
And starrs, like tapers, burn’d upon his herse.
a1678 A. Marvell Wks. III. 510
In two of his three references to catafalques mentioned earlier, Evelyn has ‘hearse, or catafalque’ and ‘catafalque, or hearse’, which suggests they were synonyms for him.
b) Then [1552] hearse became a permanent framework of iron ‘or other metal, fixed over a tomb to support rich coverings or palls, often adapted to carry lighted tapers’.
c) Next [c.1575] hearse could refer to ‘A temple-shaped structure of wood used in royal and noble funerals, after the earlier kind [a above] went out of use. It was decorated with banners, heraldic devices, and lighted candles; and it was customary for friends to pin short poems or epitaphs upon it’.
These next lines refer to a ‘marble’ hearse, but I wonder if it conceivably could have been wood painted to look like marble, a trick sometimes used in the interiors of grander houses.
Vnder this Marble Hearse Lyes the subiect of all Verse.
1623 W. Browne Epit. C’tess Pembroke in W. Camden Remaines 340
The OED citations for that meaning include this, which reflects the definition’s statement about pinning verses being pinned to the hearse:
Shall I to pin upon thy Herse, devise Eternal Praises; or weep Elegies?
1659 T. Pecke Parnassi Puerperium 119
d) Hearse could also mean a light framework of wood over the body to support the pall at funerals [1566]; the funeral pall itself [1530]; and even a bier or coffin, as in Julius Caesar, when a ‘plebeian’ tells others to stand back from Caesar’s body:
Stand from the Hearse, stand from the Body.
a1616 W. Shakespeare Julius Caesar (1623) iii. ii. 163
e) Finally, by 1650 it is first recorded in the OED being used for the vehicle transporting the coffin.
Given all those different meanings the OED records, it looks as if its meaning was hazy for quite some time.
Evelyn uses it as synonymous with catafalque;in his French primer of 1530, Palsgrave gives it two meanings; andBullokar includes it in his dictionary of hard words of 1616, the English Expositor, so he clearly felt it was in need of explanation for some people:Hearse, a buriall coffin couered with blacke.
coffin – This is another word English owes to French, but its ancestry is Greek. It came from Old French cofin, coffin, ‘little basket, case’, which comes from Latin cophinus (later cofinus), which in turn comes from Greek κόϕινος ‘basket’. (Coffer also comes from this source.)
In Middle English it was spelled cofine, coffyne and many variants, including some with ph, cophyn.
a) When first recorded in English, in Wycliffite sermons (1380) and the Bible (1382), it translated the Latin cofinus of the Vulgate:
et occiderunt septuaginta viros et posuerunt capita eorum in cofinis
Thei…slewen the seventy men, and putten the hevedis of hem in cofynes
2 Kings x. 7
In this meaning it could even refer to the receptacle Moses lay in in the bulrushes, as in one of the first Latin-English dictionaries:
Tibin a baskette or coffyn made of wickers or bulle rushes, or barke of a tree: suche one was Moyses put into.
1538 T. Elyot The Dictionary of syr Thomas Elyot
b) Coffin could also mean ‘a chest, case, casket or box’ (from 1330 onwards)
Here’s one of ivory:
A Cophyn of Evore.
c1425 Wyntoun Cron. viii. viii. 19
c) Only in 1525 is coffin first recorded (by the OED) in its current meaning. Cawdrey included it in his Table Alphabeticall of 1604:
Cophin, basket, or chest for a dead body to be put in.
People must have buried their dead in containers before they called them coffins. In Old English the word was cist, cest, cyst and variants, which itself is from Greek and is the ancestor of our ‘chest’. It appears in Chaucer with that meaning:
He is now deed, and nayled in his chest.
c1386 G. Chaucer Clerk’s Prol. 29
funeral – This is another ultimately Latin word borrowed via French. Or, to be precise, as the OED shows it, from both French and Latin. For the noun referring to the ceremony, the origin is Middle French funerales (Modern French funérailles) AND post-classical Latin funeralia, the neuter plural of the adjective funeralis, derived from Latin fūnus, fūneris.
In early use in English it was often in the plural, imitating the Latin, and its earliest citation refers to funeral expenses rather than the ceremony itself, as in this extract from a will:
After that my funerales and dethe be paied.
1496 Will of George Celey (P.R.O.: PROB. 11/11) f. 68v
to grieve – A primordial emotion and another loanword. Again from French and through it from Latin.
In Middle English in the sense ‘to harm, oppress’ as greve and variants: from Old French grever ‘burden, encumber’, based on popular Latin *grevāre from gravāre, ‘to load, weigh down, oppress’ from gravis ‘heavy, grave’.
Of its fourteen OED sense categories, a full eight are marked as obsolete, including its first cited use to mean, as per French and Latin, ‘to press heavily upon, to burden’:
Nimeþ ye hede þet youre herten ne by ygreued ne y-charged of glotounie ne of dronkehede.
1340 Ayenbite (1866) 260
[Take heed that your hearts be not oppressed nor burdened with gluttony or drunkenness.]
The sense of ‘causing great distress to someone’ goes back to the early thirteenth century.
It’s one of the not too numerous verbs in English that can be used with an impersonal dummy ‘it’, as in ‘it grieves me to have to tell you…’ and the like, used in that construction since the first half of the thirteenth century.
In its modern sense of ‘feel intense sorrow’ it is first recorded about 1380.
to mourn – Derives from Old English murnan, which is cognate with forms in other Germanic branches and possibly related to the Indo-European base of memory. It has been used intransitively and transitively since Old English.
to bury – Also from Old English byrg(e)an, byrigan, and in use since Old English with its modern meaning ‘to deposit a corpse in the ground’.
widow(er) – An unusual word in that the masculine ending is added to the feminine rather than the other way round. Quite often I’ve seen men calling themselves widows. I have no idea whether this is a) ignorance of the existence of widower b) an unwilled participation in a trend that is effacing the difference or c) a conscious decision to be non-sexist.
Widow comes from old English widewe. It has cognates not only in West Germanic languages (e.g. German Witwe, Dutch weduwe) but in other Indo-European languages such as Avestan viδauuā, Old Prussian widdewū and Welsh gweddw. According to the OED it corresponds to an adjective reflected in Latin viduus ‘bereft of a spouse’.
That adjective has Romance descendants whose descent from it is more or less easy to spot: Spanish viuda, Italian vedova, French veuve, Romanian văduvă.
grave – From Old English græf, related to German das Grab. Grave the noun comes from the same ultimate root as the OE verb grafan, to grave, meaning
‘to dig’ – paralleled in German by the verb graben;
‘to engrave’;
‘to form by digging’ – Stronge diches are grauen on euery syde off it.
1535 Bible (Coverdale) Ezek. iv. 2
and
‘to bury’ (obsolete) – They told you that I was dead too and graved in yonder kirk.
1876 J. Grant One of Six Hundred ix. 80.
Unlike the other words, grave has associated idioms: you can carry a secret/mystery etc. and certain emotions to the grave:
Harriet, a 23-st Galapagos tortoise, has died in a Queensland wildlife park at the age of 176, carrying to her grave the mystery of her origins.
They carried to their graves the horror of the mud, blood, and guts of serving on the Western Front.
a place can be as silent/quite as the grave:
The morning commute on the London Underground is silent as the grave…
Or, so I discovered yesterday thanks to a discussion on Twitter, people can be as silent as the grave, which was a novel usage to me:
Josephine County Attorney Mulkins has been as silent as the grave on this issue.
And then there is to dig your own grave and to turn in your grave.
tomb – Unlike a grave, which can just be a hold in the ground, a tomb suggests a monument of some kind. As Oxford Online defines it: ‘A monument to the memory of a dead person, erected over their burial place’.
It can also be:
‘A large vault, typically an underground one, for burying the dead’.
Tomb comes from Anglo-Norman toumbe and is paralleled in Modern French by tombe, Spanish & Portuguese tumba and Italian tomba. All derive from the post-Classical Latin tumba, which in turn derives from Greek τύμβος. Beyond that, nobody seems to be sure.
In Spanish, you can say ‘soy una tumba’ [literally ‘I am a tomb’] in the same way you can say ‘my lips are sealed’ or ‘I shan’t breathe a word.’ The same applies to Italian ‘sono una tomba.’ German uses something similar: ‘Ich schweige wie ein Grab’ or ‘Ich bin verschwiegen wie ein’ Grab’.
In line with historical verbing, to coffin, to tomb and to widow have all been created at different times.
Shakespeare used to widow in a gruesome combination with another verb:
In this City hee Hath widdowed and vnchilded many a one.
a1616 W. Shakespeare Coriolanus (1623) v. vi. 152
To tomb (‘to place a body in a tomb’) has being going since the late thirteenth century. The OED notes its current use as ‘chiefly archaic or poetic’, suggesting also that it might be a shortening of the more normal to entomb. I am not sure whether this next quotation is striving for effect, but anyway, here is a modern citation:
A genuine nobility pulses through the ancient cathedral where the great of England are tombed, from poets to kings.
2011, National Post (Canada) (Nexis) 30 Apr. rw4
References:
“bier, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2021, oed.com/view/Entry/18783. Accessed 21 April 2021.
“bury, v.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2021, oed.com/view/Entry/25160. Accessed 21 April 2021.
“catafalque, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2021, oed.com/view/Entry/28690. Accessed 21 April 2021.
“coffin, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2021, oed.com/view/Entry/35802. Accessed 21 April 2021.
“funeral, adj. and n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2021, oed.com/view/Entry/75519. Accessed 21 April 2021.
“grave, n.1.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2021, oed.com/view/Entry/80989. Accessed 21 April 2021.
“grieve, v.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2021, oed.com/view/Entry/81401. Accessed 21 April 2021.
“hearse, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2021, oed.com/view/Entry/85060. Accessed 21 April 2021.
“mourn, v.1.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2021, oed.com/view/Entry/122939. Accessed 21 April 2021.
“tomb, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2021, oed.com/view/Entry/203084. Accessed 21 April 2021. “widow, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2021, oed.com/view/Entry/228912. Accessed 21 April 2021.
“widow, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2021, oed.com/view/Entry/228912. Accessed 21 April 2021.
April 21, 2021
His bark is worse than his bite; Perro que ladra nunca muerde; Can che abbaia non morde
An updated version of a post originally published in 2017. The update is because I have now tracked down the Latin source underlying ‘barking dogs don’t bite’. Exciting times, egh?
As non-gender-specific Human’s best friend, dogs have understandably inspired much proverbial wisdom and colourful phrases down the ages and in many languages.
Sometimes a doggy thought expressed in English in one way is expressed (technically ‘lexicalised’) differently in another European language. I was reminded of this truism when a Bulgarian character in a radio soap (‘The Archers’) asked what ‘her bark is worse than her bite’ means.
The Spanish equivalent that I’ve occasionally heard used is ‘perro que ladra no muerde’ [literally ‘dog that barks, doesn’t bite’, the omission of the article in Spanish arguably giving the phrase a sort of epigrammatic, emphatic, gnomic quality]. You use it as a comment on someone’s personality, meaning, as you will already have worked out, that ‘their bark is worse than their bite’.
(As it happens, the exact same syntax applies to the French and Italian equivalents: chien qui aboie ne mort pas and can che abbaia non morde.)
At this point, it’s worth defining what a ‘proverb’ is: according to the Oxford Online Dictionary, it is ‘A short, well-known pithy saying, stating a general truth or piece of advice.’ To my mind, ‘his bark is worse than his bite’ is a catchphrase, not a proverb, since it can inflect (his/her/their/your) etc. But these are quibbles.
It turns out that there is an English proverb with the ‘same meaning’ as the Fr/Sp/Ital formulations: A barking dog never bites. It is just far less common than the alternative already mentioned, which most English speakers will recognise and – as occasion demands – use.
Proverbs tend not to be that well represented in written corpora; even so, for example, ‘…worse than…bite’ crops up 163 times in the Oxford English Corpus (July 2017) compared to the other’s…well…just twice.
One of those is in a passage where dog tropes are part of the narrative style (see1 below for a longer extract), while the other is attributed to an altogether different language: ‘There’s a saying in Syria: a barking dog never bites,” said Adnan Diab, a Syrian teacher living in Lebanon.’
In contrast, ‘X’s bark is worse than their bite’ (oh, the lengths one has to go to to be gender-neutral) is so well established that it readily lends itself to punning, as the following example and the one at2 below show.
‘My favorite Gary Ingle story is about the piano teacher who taught her cocker spaniel how to play all fifteen two-part Inventions of J.S. Bach. The dog’s Bach was worse than his bite.’ American Music Teacher, 2015
Although a barking dog never bites will NOT trip readily of most people’s tongues, it goes back a long way, according to The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs (CODP), which gives a thirteenth-century French example: ciascuns chiens qui abaie ne mort pas.
The Trésor de la langue française (a sort of French OED) suggests that that ancient formulation is still valid in the form chien qui aboie ne mort pas (note the omission of any article before chien, similarly to the Spanish version).
The CODP also furnishes an entertaining 1980 quotation, from the 1 May Daily Torygraph:
‘A canvassing candidate came to a house where there was an Alsatian who [NB] barked ferociously. His agent said: “Just go in. Don’t you know the proverb ‘A barking dog never bites’?” “Yes,” said the candidate, “I know the proverb, you know the proverb, but does the dog know the proverb?”’
Finally, German has the exact equivalent of the English Hunde, die bellen, beißen nicht [dogs that bark don’t bite] whereas Italian can che abbaia non morde has the gnomic brevity of the Spanish and French, and is elegantly translated by Google as ‘Can that barks does not bite’. Which comes from which? Or is there an underlying Latin source?
Update:
The Latin source is as follows. In his history of the exploits of Alexander the Great, the (probably) first-century ad Roman historian Quintus Curtius Rufus tells the story of how the Persian satrap Bessus, at a drunken feast, boasts he will vanquish Alexander. He is enjoined to rein in his bluster and braggadocio by the soi-disant seer Cobares, who embellishes his rhetoric with the saying
‘a timid cur barks more furiously than he bites’
(quod apud Bactrianos vulgo usurpabant, canem timidum vehementius latrare quam mordere). As Curtius tells the story, this was a double-whammy proverb among the Bactrians because the second part of it runs ‘and the deepest rivers flow with the least sound’ (altissima quaeque flumina minimo sono labi).
1 ‘Some might say election season turns into a dog-eat-dog political world, with candidates performing dog-and-pony shows. And while some would point out that a barking dog never bites, others would agree that the whole thing has gone to the dogs.’ Cincinnati.com, 2012.
2 This extract refers to a hot dog eating competition as reported in the New York Post in 2007. Yuck and double yuck!
In a record-shattering wiener war yesterday, Joey Chestnut downed 66 Nathan’s hot dogs, besting six-time defending champ Takeru Kobayashi ‘s 63. Chestnut reclaimed the Mustard Yellow Belt for the United States by scarfing down a total of 20,394 calories at the annual Nathan’s hot-dog eating contest in Coney Island.Despite a jaw injury that nearly prevented him from competing, Kobayashi stayed neck and neck with Chestnut until the end of the 12-minute battle when his barf [sc. vomit] proved worse than his bite.
March 28, 2021
Lockdownversary – Collins Dictionary Language Blog
With the 23rd of March marking the anniversary of the first UK lockdown, we look at words around hobbies and pastimes used to fill our time.
March 23, 2021
What does ‘It’s a dog-eat-dog world’ mean? And a doggy-dog world?
Photo by Alejandro Morelos on UnsplashThis last lockdown year in the UK has been a boom time for online suppliers of all kinds. It’s also been a boom time for the popularity of our canine friends. So much of a boom, in fact, that dognapping is on the rise, as was evidenced across the pond by the high-profile dognapping of Lady Gaga’s French bulldogs. The last time I looked at the figures for the UK, roughly a quarter of all adults possessed dogs, who numbered nearly 10 million.
Actually, I say ‘canine friends’ somewhat tongue in cheek as I’m rather ambivalent – not to say cynical1 – about the whole mutt race. On the one hand, I’ve never owned one (though I have owned three cats); I’ve been bitten – well, ‘nipped’ would be more accurate – twice (both times by Alsatians/German shepherds2); I can’t abide incessant barking or yapping; and the innumerable times I’ve had to scrape doggy doo out of my corrugated soles does not endear the little darlings to me (though, of course, I recognise that is their owners’ fault, not theirs.)
On the other hand – and this must be genetic in humans and instinctual – when I see one, the urge to pat/stroke/caress is almost overwhelming – as is the need to talk in that kind of potentially shaming canine baby talk people automatically adopt (‘Who’s a clever boy, then?’).
When I see cute pictures of pooches I gurgle. Whenever our neighbour’s cockapoo (I ask you! Whoever dreamt up that portmanteau had cloth ears) aka ‘Hector’ leapt into our garden and had to be scooped up and returned home, he always spread a broad grin across my wizened phizog, because he was, frankly, completely mental and absolutely adorable. As an adult, he’s a lot calmer.
Clearly, some kind of therapy is required — for me, I mean, not Hector.
‘A dog is a dog is a dog’ Gertrude Stein might have said. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) seems to disagree, since it gives the noun dog no fewer than…down, boy, wait for it…88 ‘senses’ i.e. different meanings, and 166 subentries (many of which are the proverbs and phrases one of which I’ll be coming on to shortly).
And dog is also one of those mysterious OED words that have the experts staring into the void: ’ Origin: Of unknown origin. Etymology: Origin unknown.’
I digress.
It’s a dog-eat-dog world…is a bit of a cliché. Where does it come from? The first relevant quotation in the OED is from a 5 August 1794 headline in the Gazette of the United States: ‘Dog eat dog’. The next quotation (1822) is from a British source, and then The Times of 30 December 1854 has an example which explains the meaning very well:
‘It was dog eat dog—tit for tat… the customers cheated us in their fabrics; we cheated the customers with our goods.’
But why should a dog eat another dog? Have you ever seen it happen? Have you heard about it happening? Me neither. Yes, some barbaric people (used to) organise dog fights, but the losing hound dies or is slaughtered, not eaten.
It’s a dog-eat-dog world and variants, in fact, echo an earlier proverb that comes all the way from Latin. That proverb, nowadays rather less common than its pup, is ‘dog does not eat dog’ which comes from the Latin grammarian Varro’s canis caninam non est3, literally ‘dog dog’s flesh not eats’.
This is first recorded by the OED from the 1543 anti-Catholic diatribe The Huntyng & Fyndyng out of the Romishe Fox sig. A iiv by the cleric and naturalist W. Turner (the Dictionary of National Biography opines that ‘Turner’s exposition of protestant teachings alternates with sometimes scurrilous sexual imagery and coarsely textured abuse’):
That the prouerb may haue a place on dog will not eat of an other dogges fleshe nether will on wolf eat of an other.
Shakespeare played with the idea in Troilus and Cressida ‘One bear will not bite another, and wherefore should one bastard?’ (v. vii. 19)
And Charles Kingsley (he of The Water Babies) used the nowadays canonical form in Hereward the Wake:
‘Dog does not eat dog, and it is hard to be robbed by an Englishman, after being robbed a dozen times by the French.’ (II. xi)
(Hereward the Wake led local resistance in the Fens to the invading Normans [i.e. ‘French’].)
It’s a doggy dog worldNow, the idea of mutts eating one another must have struck some cynophilists as so bizarre and inconceivable that they had to eggcornize it to ‘it’s a doggy dog world’, as recorded in the eggcorns database (the hyperlinks there to sources are dead, btw) and as it pops up in Google Ngrams.
e.g. ‘Americans are always in a rush, always looking at the clock, never waiting patiently. It’s a doggy dog world out there.’
The mechanism for the eggcorn is easy to understand, as the database points out: it’s t/d deletion (the ‘t’ of eat), which also accounts for other eggcorns such as *coal-hearted and *bran-new. What I can’t quite grasp is what kind of world a doggy dog one is, in the perception of the eggcornizers.
And no doubt doggy dog world has been consolidated in some people’s usage by the rapper Snoop Dogg’s song Doggy Dogg World and the fact that he originally styled himself Snoop Doggy Dogg.
1 Ultimately from the Greek word for dog, κύων, κυνός (kyōn, kynos) via κυνικός (kynikos) ‘dog-like, currish, churlish’, via Latin cynicus, with possibly some influence of French.
2 What is it with me and Guatemalan Alsatians? The first bite was administered to me as a child in Guatemala; the second as an adult in Argentina by the Guatemalan ambassador’s dog, no less.
3 That est, btw, has nothing to do with the 3rd person singular of the verb ‘to be’ esse, meaning ‘is’, as in i.e. ‘id est’; it is an archaic form of the verb ĕdēre, ‘to eat’, from which, ultimately, comes English edible.
This is an updated version of a post published in 2017.
References:
“dog, n.1.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2021, oed.com/view/Entry/56405. Accessed 22 March 2021.
“cynical, adj.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2021, oed.com/view/Entry/46639. Accessed 22 March 2021.
Charlton T. Lewis, Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1879), Perseus Digital Library. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/t... (accessed 22 March, 2021).
March 16, 2021
(In the) Mean while or meanwhile? Commonly confused words (35-36)
To write several similar pairs (a while, any more, etc.) as one word or two is a matter of convention, and conventions can, and do, change over time.1
I was forcefully reminded of this while reading Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), a Gothic classic that keeps making me visualize a sort of Ken Russell – if not Hammer horror – film before its time, or “avant la lettre”, if I wish to be flowery, which I often do.
The narrator falls into the hands of murderous outlaws who want to drug him – and a baroness who has also fallen into their clutches – by giving them a spiked drink (or a sleeping draught, in more trad language).
“In the mean while our host [Baptiste, a bandit] had drawn the cork, and, filling two of the goblets, offered them to the lady and myself. She at first made some objections, but the instances of Baptiste were so urgent, that she was obliged to comply. Fearing to excite suspicion, I hesitated not to take the goblet presented to me. By its smell and colour, I guessed it to be champagne; but some grains of powder floating upon the top convinced me that it was not unadulterated.”
(Fret not: the hero does manage to avoid drinking the potion, and then feigns sleep. Tales of his derring-do fill at least another hundred pages.)
Note that “In the mean while” at the start of the extract.
Some history…As the revised (2001) OED entry notes: “The one-word form (first found in the 16th cent.) has become steadily more frequent since the early 19th cent., and has been the standard form since the end of the 19th cent.”
Modern meanwhile has simply obliterated the space that manifests its etymology. It is, quite simply, a combination of “mean” the adjective and “while” the noun. That adjectival meaning is defined by the OED as “Intermediate in time; coming or occurring between two points of time or two events” and gave rise to the now obsolete adverbs the mean season and mean space, both meaning, um…, “meanwhile.”
Mean[ ]while itself, is first recorded as a noun from some time before 1375:
Boþe partiȝes…made hem alle merie in þe mene while.
(Both parties…all made merry in the meanwhile.)
William of Palerne.
and as an adverb in the first English-Latin dictionary, the Promptorium Parvulorum (“Storehouse for Children” or “Little Egbert’s Crib Sheet”) of 1440:
Mene whyle, interim.
Annoyingly, the OED doesn’t present a single-word example from the sixteenth century: its first “solid” example is:
Upon this subject I will in my next Number make an appeal… In the meanwhile let me pride myself a little on the circumstance [etc.].
Cobbett’s Weekly Polit. Reg. 33 101, 1818.
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In the Bard’s work too…Shakespeare used the word(s), e.g.
Let the lawes of Rome determine all,
Meane while am I possest of that is mine.
Titus Andronicus i. i. 405, 1594.
but much more often he used (in the) meantime, as when Portia says:
For never shall you lie by Portia’s side
With an unquiet soul. You shall have gold
To pay the petty debt twenty times over:
When it is paid, bring your true friend along.
My maid Nerissa and myself meantime
Will live as maids and widows. Come, away!
For you shall hence upon your wedding-day:
Merchant of Venice, iii. ii. 318 ff., 1600.
Modern usage follows Shakespeare. In the GloWbE corpus (Global Web-based English), in the meantime is 20 times more frequent than in the meanwhile.
Two poetic “meanwhiles”And, as I was writing this, the last words of Auden’s Friday’s Child, in memory of the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, floated into my head:
Meanwhile, a silence on the cross,
As dead as we shall ever be,
Speaks of some total gain or loss,
And you and I are free
To guess from the insulted face
Just what Appearances He saves
By suffering in a public place
A death reserved for slaves.
And then a “virtual” colleague made this comment, which I had to add:
“One of my favourite lines from the great Flann O’Brien, where the narrator in The Third Policeman describes his mother: ‘She was always making tea to pass the time, and singing snatches of old songs to pass the meantime.'”
1Witness the kerfuffle* when, in 2013, Associated Press (AP) changed its ruling about “under way” being two words in most contexts to “underway” in all contexts. Editors can be an OCDish lot – after all, part of their job consists in weeding out and correcting things that most people don’t even notice – and one such editor tweeted “I can’t be the only one who is outraged that AP is changing its style from ‘under way’ to ‘underway,’ am I?”
Copy-editing, it could be argued, is a profession whose motto invalidates the old Latin motto de minimis non est curandum (“Don’t sweat the small stuff” or, literally, “It is not to be worried about trivia”).
Whether that be true or not, conventions iz conventions, and the fact that most people abide by them makes them worth sticking to.
* An originally Scottish word, spelt curfuffle.
NB: This is an updated version of a previously published post.
References:
“kerfuffle, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2021, oed.com/view/Entry/103007. Accessed 15 March 2021.
“meanwhile, n. and adv.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2021, oed.com/view/Entry/115488. Accessed 15 March 2021.
February 25, 2021
champ vs. chomp (at the bit). A short history.
In this post, I survey the history and meanings of the verbs champ and chomp.
In an earlier post on champ/chomp at the bit I talked about the relative frequencies of each in current use.
In summary:champ is older as a verb in its own right, by anything between 51 and 247 years (depending on which source you go by);‘the dictionaries’ agree that chomp is a by-form of champ;three major English dictionaries define chomp by reference back to champ;chomp in conjunction with bit is actually recorded earlier (1645) than champ at the bit, and the subsequent OED citation for chomp also includes the word bit; andMerriam-Webster shows an intransitive chomp meaning – ‘to be eager (to do)’ – that neither Collins nor the OED does.Which is older?The earliest OED citation for to champ is from 1530, in that Teach Yourself French of its day with knobs on, John Palgrave’s L’esclarcissement [sc. éclaircissement] de la langue francoyse (‘The Elucidation of the French Tongue’):
I champe a thing small bytwene my tethe, je masche.
[Modern French je mâche]
The earliest OED citation for to chomp is from 1645 – already, however, with reference to the bit, though not with at.
The Cittadell here,..serves as a shrew’d Curb unto her [sc. the town], which makes her often Chomp upon the Bit.
J. Howell Epistolæ Ho-elianæ i. xi. 22
Merriam-Webster Unabridged makes to champ considerably older (before 1398; see below) by referring it back to Middle English. M-W also gives an earlier date for chomp – 1581 – than the OED.
Where does champ come from?Collins suggests it’s probably imitative, ergo onomatopoeic – imagine the noisiest eater, chewer or chomper you know, and that might give you the idea –, as does the OED.
In support of that origin, the OED [1889 entry] states that “Cham (chawm, chamb), champ, and the dialect chamble (Halliwell), appear all to belong to a primary chamb, apparently closely connected or identical with jam v.1 (jamb), and jamble, to squeeze with violence, crush.”
In addition, the OED refers to evidence that in languages far removed from English cham(b) represents the chewing sound.
The Merriam-Webster Unabridged intriguingly refers champ to Middle English champen and chammen. The Michigan Middle English Compendium gives two quotations for chammen and assigns to it the meanings ‘to bite upon something; to gnash the teeth.’
The earlier of its citations is from the oft-cited John Trevisa’s On the Properties of Things and dates to before 1398:
It is ful hard and may nouʒt be chewed, and while men chammeþ [L masticatus] þer on. XVII, 5.
The ‘It’ here is the fruit of the ‘tree of aloes’ – presumably Aloe vera – ‘The trée of Aloes comforteth the stomacke, and maketh good digestion, & helpeth against féeblenesse of the heart, & the braine.’
Image by Bishnu Sarangi from PixabayWhere does chomp come from?Collins, the OED and M-W Unabridged all agree that chomp is an alteration of champ. In support of this hypothesis, the OED proposes the parallel case of to stamp producing to stomp.
What do they mean?to champCollins doesn’t separate transitive from intransitive:
1. to munch (food) noisily like a horse
2. (when intr, often foll by on, at, etc) to bite (something) nervously or impatiently; gnaw
3. champ at the bit
OED
The meanings it gives seem to parallel the Collins ones.
1. transitive. To crush and chew by vigorous and noisy action of the jaws; to munch. Also with up. (cf. Collins 1)
2. transitive. To bite upon (anything hard); said especially of a horse which impatiently bites the bit in its mouth. (cf. Collins 2)
3. intransitive or absol. To make a biting and chewing action or movement with the jaws and teeth. (cf. Collins 2)
Merriam-Webster Unabridged echoes the other two dictionaries while subdividing 1 into a and b and adding different transitive meanings 2 and 3. It assigns champ (at) the bit its own meaning category.
1a: to chew on with noisy vigor
<champing his food with the gusto of a healthy young animal — MacLean’s Magazine> (cf. OED & Collins 1)
b: to bite on repeatedly or grind the teeth forcefully against
<champing the stem of his pipe in his teeth — Marcia Davenport> (cf. OED & Collins 2)
2: to open and close with force and noise : gnash
champing enormous claws — I. L. Idriess>
3: mash, trample
<champing soil and water into mud>
intransitive verb
1: to make biting or gnashing movements or gestures : bite
champing behind a barrier — Upton Sinclair>
champing on leaves — Peggy Bennett> (cf. Collins 2 & OED 3)
2: to show restive impatience of delay or restraint
champing to apply scientific methods — W. H. Whyte>
champ at the bit or champ the bit
1 of a horse : to bite or gnash a bit in unruliness or impatience
champed the bit … ready to bolt — Zane Grey>
2: to be impatient of restraint or inactivity
champ the bit and foam in fetters — Lord Byron>
Collins:
to chew (food) noisily; champ
Collins Cobuild defines it thus: ‘If a person or animal chomps their way through food or chomps on food, they chew it noisily’ and labels it informal.
OED:
Like Collins, cross-refers it to champ:
“Formerly only dialect and U.S. Now a widespread variant of champ v. (esp. in senses 1, 2 and 3)” (which are the senses shown above in this post.)
A draft addition (2007) notes “intransitive. figurative. Chiefly North American. to chomp at the bit: = to champ at the bit at champ v.’
Merriam-Webster Unabridged conflates transitive and intransitive uses in its first category and, like the other two, cross-refers chomp to champ:
1 transitive + intransitive : to chew or bite on something : champ
chomping on a bone>
chomp bigger bites out of broadcast network budgets. — Inside Media, 12 Sept. 1990>
2 intransitive : to feel or show impatient eagerness to do something
chomping to hit the playing diamond. — Ronald Waldo, The Battling Bucs of 1925, 2012>
What’s interesting here is that Merriam-Webster alone notes that to chomp works on its own, without at the bit, in the meaning illustrated in the example at 2, ‘a group of players who were chomping to hit the playing diamond.’
Several corpus examples bear this out, e.g. ‘Ivy League schools were chomping to sign the egghead kid with the rocket arm.’
What about the relative ages of champ/chomp at the bit?The earliest OED citation for chomp at the bit is from 1937:
Apparently very dejected but perhaps merely ‘chomping at the bit’ because of his suspension,..Dizzy Dean, star St. Louis Cardinal pitcher, is shown as he sat in the stands.
Salamanca (N.Y.) Republican-Press 4 June 8/4 (caption)
The earliest OED citation for champ at the bit is from 1885:
‘Little breeches’ has been tramping down all the tall timber in his vicinity and champing at the bit tremendously, in his impatience..to tackle Gov. Hoadley in a political discussion.
Newark (Ohio) Daily Advocate 1 Oct.
However, as mentioned earlier, chomp appears in the same clause as bit way back in 1645.
Though many will disagree with me, all in all there seems to me a very strong case for arguing that chomp at the bit should just be accepted as an alternative to champ at the bit.
What’s the difference in age between the first two citations of each?I won’t use the dreaded “How long is a piece of string?” As mentioned earlier, the mininum is 51 years, if you take the OED‘s 1530 for champ and M-W’s 1581 for chomp. If instead you take Middle English chammen (a1398) as the root for champ, and the OED’s 1645 for chomp, you end up with a minimum of 247 years. And there are other permutations.
References:
“Champ.” Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://unabridged.merriam-webster.com/unabridged/champ. Accessed 25 Feb. 2021.
“Chomp.” Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://unabridged.merriam-webster.com/unabridged/chomp. Accessed 24 Feb. 2021.
“champ, v.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, December 2020, oed.com/view/Entry/30383. Accessed 25 February 2021.
“chomp, v.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, December 2020, oed.com/view/Entry/32193. Accessed 25 February 2021.
Middle English Dictionary. Ed. Robert E. Lewis, et al. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1952-2001. Online edition in Middle English Compendium. Ed. Frances McSparran, et al.. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Library, 2000-2018. <http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/>. Accessed 25 February 2021.
February 10, 2021
Champ at the bit or chomp at the bit? Which is correct? Commonly confused words (31-32)
On one of my posts, a reader commented how much it annoyed them when people said chomp at the bit rather than champ at the bit and suggested I should blog about it. So here goes.
To quote verbatim, my correspondent (there must, surely, be a more up-to-date word for someone who comments on a blog post) wrote: ‘I hear a lot of people who say “chomping at the bit” rather than “champing at the bit” which whether or not it has come into common use is wrong and smacks of a poor education and a poor vocabulary.’
That raises two obvious major questions.
Q1: Has chomp … in fact come into common use?
In other words, how common is it vs champ?
(And, might there be ‘regional’ variation?)
Q2: Who decides whether it is ‘wrong’? What do they say?
It also raised in my mind…
Q3: What do editors and others who care, think?
And, of course,
Q4: What do these words mean, and what is the history of and relation between the two forms – and any others, such as chafing.
I’ll answer the first three each in two parts, a short answer and then a longer one for anyone who wants more information. For the sake of (relative) brevity in this post, Q4 requires a separate post.
Q1: Has chomp come into common use?
Short answer:
Yes. And in most varieties of English it is more often used than champ.
Longer answer:
It depends where in the English-speaking world you’re talking about, and also what kind of writing.
I consulted six sets of data: The Oxford English Corpus February 2014, Oxford Monitor Corpus April 2018, the News on the Web (NOW) corpus, the Global Corpus of Web-based English (GloWbE), the Corpus of Historical American (COHA) and the Hansard corpus.
According to the Oxford English Corpus data consulted, while in February 2014 chomp.* at the bit was more frequent than champ.* (414:310), the picture varied by region.
(The .* means all forms of the verb, although 88 per cent are continuous tenses in any case, i.e. with the form champing/chomping.)
In BrE chomp.* was less frequent (97:121) but in U.S. English the opposite was true (201/102). Canadian usage was in line with U.S., while Australian was closer to British (chomp.* 15: champ.* 25).
However, by the time of the April 2018 Monitor Corpus, things had changed for BrE: chomp.* was now commoner (224:179). Whether this is an indication of increasing U.S. influence it is impossible to say. For the U.S., the difference between the two forms had increased (876: 336), but for Australia the difference had stayed almost exactly the same in percentage terms (chomp.* 40: champ.* 68). Overall, the ratio was 2,248:1,171.
The three other data sources consulted are from the Brigham Young University corpora. The Global Corpus of Web-based English (GloWbE), which covers 20 different country varieties of English, showed chomp.* to be more than twice as frequent (377:152) and to be more frequent in every country except Australia. But even there, the gap had narrowed (chomp 24: champ 32).
The NOW corpus showed chomp.* to be about 57 per cent or so commoner than champ, that is, by a smaller margin than the GloWbE data (1415:901). My hunch is that because this material is written by journalists of various kinds, who are more likely to have an idea of what is considered to be correct, they are more likely to ‘correct’ themselves, in contrast to the GloWbE writers, who can be anyone anywhere.
Then, to see what a historical corpus showed, I looked at COHA, which is the largest such corpus available. It showed chomp.* at six occurrences, and first appearing as late as the 1980s, and champ.* at 20 and first appearing in 1880.
Finally, the Hansard corpus, i.e. a corpus of British parliamentary proceedings 1802–2005, produces an intriguing result. A search for verbs preceding the string at the bit produces 49 examples of champ from the 1930s onwards, seven of chafing, and one each of straining and pulling but absolutely none of chomp. Does this mean that the honourable members to a person believe it is the correct and only version? Or could it be that the transcribers have corrected what was said?
Q2: Who decides whether it is ‘wrong’? What do they say?
Short answer:
Well, each of us can (and often does in practice) decide if we think a particular use of a word, phrase, etc., is wrong, but it is generally dictionaries and usage guides that are taken as objective judges of such matters.
The OED, the Oxford Online Dictionary, Collins and Merriam-Webster make no comment about the correctness or otherwise of chomp.
Longer answer:
It is not listed in either the Cambridge Guide to English Usage or the Merriam-Webster Concise Dictionary of English Usage. I added it to my edition of Fowler and noted there that chomp is more frequent than champ in the corpus I consulted at the time and sententiously ended the note with ‘some purists will see it as an egregious mistake, even though it is recorded in dictionaries’.
It is also mentioned in Paul Brians’ Common Errors in English Usage.
The dictionaries consulted deal with it as follows:
Oxford Dictionary Online: just gives the phrase chomp at the bit under chomp.OED: In a 2007 draft addition, notes ‘Chiefly Amer. to chomp at the bit : = to champ at the bit’. In other words, it says it is the equivalent of champ, but refrains from judgement on the phrase itself. However, the whole (1972?) entry for chomp is headed by the rubric formerly dialect and U.S., which could be construed as relegating U.S. English to the status of a dialect (!), though I’m quite sure this is not what the lexicographers meant.Collins: their dictionary for learners, Cobuild, lists chomp at the bit without comment.However, the dictionary for mother-tongue speakers for British English does not list it under chomp, but the dictionary for U.S. English does.Merriam-Webster Unabridged shows both versions without comment.However, the online M-W version cross-refers the relevant meaning of chomp to the entry for the verb champ while specifying that chomp in that meaning is usually in the phrase chomping at the bit. This could either be an example of lexicographers being economical, or a subtle implication that champ is preferable.Q3: What do editors, and others who care and are presumably vocabulary-rich, think?
Who knows?
A simple way would be to ask them whether they would leave it or emend it when editing.
I tried that.
In a tiny survey on Twitter, 9 out of 12 people said they would change it.
17% I’m not U.S. & wld leave
42% I’m not U.S. & wld change
08% I’m U.S. & wld leave it
33% I’m U.S. & wld change it
There is also the poll at the head of this post. Interestingly, it shows that U.S. speakers are almost evenly divided about correcting chomp to champ, whereas British speakers decidedly would change it.
This is an updated version of a previously published post.
January 20, 2021
Penguin awareness, penguin suits, Penguin books & Welsh
Image by Siggy Nowak from Pixabay5-minute readPenguinsIt’s #penguinawarenessday today. Which is a jolly good thing since, I suspect, most people other than Pingu fans and naturalists will be blissfully unaware of them for the rest of the year.
I bet you’ll never guess from which language English borrowed penguin. Could it be from those adventurous mariners the Dutch, as their word is pinguïn? Or perhaps from a Polynesian language? Nope, neither of those. It’s most probably from…
…
…
…
…
Welsh.
Which is interesting, because very few Welsh words have entered the mainstream of English, the royal corgi being a highly visible exception.
The Welsh origin is from pen meaning ‘head, headland’ and gwyn meaning ‘white’. And according to the OED etymologists it was probably first applied to the now extinct Great Auk. The pen part features in Penzance, Penmaenmawr and Penrith, and gwyn in the Christian names Gwyn, Gwynn, Gwynne.
Infinite were the Numbers of the foule, wch the Welsh men name Pengwin & Maglanus tearmed them Geese.
That’s an extract, dated 24 August 1577, from the log kept on the Golden Hinde by the priest Francis Fletcher on Sir Francis Drake’s circumnavigation of the world. (‘Maglanus’ we know as Magellan.)
Having waddled into English, the word has dived into other languages such as French pingouin or Russian пингвин (peengveen) or Finnish pingviini. The list at the foot of the Collins entry for penguin shows how most European languages have adopted their adapted form of the word, including Greek πιγκουίνος, but the odd-person-out is Czech with its tučňák. I am reliably informed that is because it is a sort of compound consisting of the adjective tučný, ‘fatty’ and the affix –ák, which suggests the referent has the characteristic just named.
At the risk of stating the obvious, we often use words and phrases that characterise human behaviour in animal terms. Some obvious examples are that a nasty man is a swine; a wily one is an old fox; a greedy person is a pig or a gannet, and a treacherous friend is a snake. (Add your own examples here ****************)
Those words above used metaphorically make vivid use of a central conceptual metaphor: PEOPLE ARE ANIMALS.
What’s more, when we liken someone’s behaviour to that of an animal, the behaviour concerned is almost always bad, as the previous examples suggest (The early bird catches the worm is a fairly rare exception).
What we’re doing with that kind of language is making use of the overarching conceptual metaphor BAD HUMAN BEHAVIOUR IS BAD ANIMAL BEHAVIOUR.
Sweeeeeeeet!If you watch footage of penguins moving on land, they look clumsy, comical, almost touchingly vulnerable, quite endearing in their ridiculousness, even sweeeeet. But the metaphor we draw from their behaviour is the opposite of warm or affectionate. As the OED puts it: ‘humorous or derogatory. A man wearing black-and-white evening dress, esp. one having a stiff or pompous demeanour’.
The earliest use comes from that now-defunct engine of lively prose and teenage excitement, Melody Maker, 1 April 1967:
Good Music had the sort of melody and clipping beat that even Victor Sylvester didn’t have to alter so that the Brylcreemed penguins and their sequined partners could jig about in the ballrooms.
Even better, because it suggests pomposity beyond the starchiness, is this from 1996:
When, for the third time, a penguin with attitude announced the absence of a number of menu dishes, I felt distinctly uneasy.
Eat Soup Dec. 45/2
Photo by Ian Parker on Unsplash.Away from the realms of imaginative writing, penguin suit for evening dress and white shirt is a phrase that anyone might use. It dates back to the very beginning of the 1960s (I bought myself a penguin suit. M. Terry, Old Liberty 36, 1961), while this next quote neatly epitomises the convention-hating attitude of the decade:
Some smooth bastard in a penguin suit. R. Jeffries Traitor’s Crime iv. 46, 1968.
What was news to me, courtesy of the OED, is that penguin suit can also mean astronauts’ gear:
The astronauts donned the tight-fitting overalls, known as a penguin suit, in which tension is produced by several layers of rubberized material.
N.Y. Times, 10 June 1971
The most visible penguin in people of a certain age’s lives will have been the one on the covers of the hugely successful Penguin paperback series, launched in 1935 and still going strong. It was chosen as the symbol as something ‘dignified but flippant’.
Those paperbacks did not stand up to repeat handling. I remember dutifully covering mine with transparent adhesive plastic (now, memory, just what was it called?) to make them last longer and stop grubby fingerprints or Marmite stains sullying their sunshiny orange. You had to spread the plastic ever so, but ever so carefully to make sure no bubbles or blisters disfigured your book’s synthetic second skin.
Some choice quotations about the Penguin paperbacks are at the end of this blog.
Meanwhile, English being so footloose – nay, cavalier – with parts of speech, it was inevitable that Penguin books should hatch a verb. Its parent seems to have been a rather snotty GBS in a 1941 letter:
I have had to let Pygmalion be penguined. My days of respectable publishing are over, I fear.
24 Feb. in Coll. Lett. 1926–50 (1988) 597
The phenomenon of Penguining is past its peak; nowadays much fiction and non-fiction appears first in hardback and then paperback, regardless of publisher. In this next quote, the author is looking back to that golden age.
For an author, to be ‘Penguined’ was a mark of high merit.
J. Sutherland, Bestsellers ii. 30, 2007.
Finally, the Chambers Slang Dictionaryand Wiktionary concur that penguin is slang for a nun (black habit, with white wimple, coif, etc.). Wiktionary also claims it is a juggling manoeuvre: ‘A type of catch where the palm of the hand is facing towards the leg with the arm stretched downward, resembling the flipper of a penguin’.
And last of all, Urban Dictionary suggests it describes a way of keeping warm: ‘When two or more people try and stand as close together as possible with both hands in their pockets to avoid cold weather and strong winds’. That is a deeply attractive metaphor, but I have no idea whether people actually use it.
Penguin BooksThe TLS gives them its blessing, 1 August 1935:
We shall look forward to more Penguin Books, and we wish the experiment—a bold one—all success.
Orwell reads a stack of them to while away the time as he sits on a roof in Barcelona in the early days of the Spanish Civil War:
Sometimes I was merely bored with the whole affair, paid no attention to the hellish noise, and spent hours reading a succession of Penguin Library books which, luckily, I had bought a few days earlier; sometimes I was very conscious of the armed men watching me fifty yards away.
Homage to Catalonia x. 177, 1938 (1937)
Dame Iris in the person of one of her characters dismisses Penguin’s polaiht English fiction:
There were a few Penguin novels, but they looked dull English tea-party stuff.
I. Murdoch, Unofficial Rose v. 51, 1962
And someone writing in The Scotsman skewers the pretensions of a fresher:
A spotty first-year student in faculty scarf and tweed jacket, reading a Penguin Classic while trying to light a brand-new pipe.
Scotsman (Nexis) 11, Nov. 5 2002
“penguin, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, December 2020, oed.com/view/Entry/140106. Accessed 13 January 2021.
Chambers Slang Dictionary, Jonathon Green, 2008. Edinburgh: Chambers.
